Eudora Welty's was a sheltered, but daring life

"The pleasures of reading itself – who doesn't remember? – were like those of a Christmas cake, a sweet devouring."

This line, from the Eudora Welty essay, "A Sweet Devouring," introduces the second chapter of Carolyn Brown's new biography of the Mississippi author, a chapter that describes Welty's education. While certainly her post-secondary education was impressive for a woman of her generation – she attended Mississippi State College for Women and the University of Wisconsin in Madison to earn her BA, and began a degree at Columbia Business School in New York City – it was undoubtedly her home education that influenced her career the most.

In her autobiography, Eudora Welty described her life as "sheltered." Her father, Christian, was an insurance man who loved puzzles and games of all kinds, photography and travel, passions he passed on to Eudora. Her mother, Chestina ("Chessie"), a former schoolteacher with a college degree, was the bookworm of the family. When Chessie was a child, her father wanted to cut her hair and she refused – but was eventually bribed with a set of Charles Dickens novels.

This quality rubbed off on Eudora, who said she "must have given her (mother) no peace," until she was herself old enough to read, as she recalls hounding Chessie for a story at all hours of the day.

Described by the publisher as the first young-adult Eudora Welty biography, "A Daring Life" could also be billed as a crash course in Welty lore. In just over 100 pages, it manages to give a full – if concise – portrait of her personal life and career, with appendices including a chronology of Welty's life, her published works, major adaptations of her works, and a list of honorary degrees and major awards.

Eudora Welty's was a life of subtle contradictions. In some superficial ways she was rather conventional (though "sheltered" overstates it); wherever she roamed for school or adventure, she always returned to Jackson and her family home on Pinehurst Street, where she lived her entire life. (She deeded it to the State of Mississippi in 1986.)

She never married, but had a healthy social life with a large circle of close friends. Despite her exposure to the greater world through education and travel, her primary literary inspiration seemed to be her own backyard, and her friends and family at home in Mississippi.

Yet Brown's biography is called, rightfully, "A Daring Life." Eudora Welty achieved a stunning amount of critical success in her lifetime, winning numerous O. Henry awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, a National Medal for Literature, and a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Ahead of her time and place in many ways, the Civil Rights era highlighted Welty's daring. Her sympathy for the movement was not merely a moral stance taken behind closed doors with other like-minded friends and family, but informed her public decisions. She spoke at Tougaloo College, an all-black institution, during a time when white visitors were literally monitored by the state, and when she was asked to lecture at a literary festival hosted by Millsaps College, she requested the event be open to all, despite (or because of) a recent incident there where African-American students had not been allowed to attend a theatrical production. Heartbroken by Medgar Evers' murder in her hometown, she wrote a hard-hitting short story from the perspective of his white assassin that was published in the New Yorker to wide acclaim.

Eudora Welty died on July 23, 2001 after being celebrated by her home state and the nation as a whole for the better part of two decades. Her autobiography, "One Writer's Beginnings," was actually three lectures she gave at Harvard in 1983. She remained active until her final few years, celebrating her 85th birthday party at Lemuria Bookstore in Jackson, with birthday greetings from the likes of President Clinton and Jim Lehrer. When she died, her casket lay in state in the rotunda of the Old Capitol Museum.

Welty was, in her own words, "a writer who came of a sheltered life." But, "a sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within."